What counts to me mainly at this early stage is that he – as opposed to dear Hillary – is unlikely to start a war against Russia. His questioning of the absolute sacredness of NATO, calling it “obsolete”, and his meeting with Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, an outspoken critic of US regime-change policy, specifically Syria, are encouraging signs.

Even more so is his appointment of General Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser. Flynn dined last year in Moscow with Vladimir Putin at a gala celebrating RT (Russia Today), the Russian state’s English-language, leftist-leaning TV channel. Flynn now carries the stigma in the American media as an individual who does not see Russia or Putin as the devil. It is truly remarkable how nonchalantly American journalists can look upon the possibility of a war with Russia, even a nuclear war.

The most frequent comment I’ve read in the mainstream media concerning Fidel Castro’s death is that he was a “dictator”; almost every heading bore that word. Since the 1959 revolution, the American mainstream media has routinely referred to Cuba as a dictatorship. But just what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship?

No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is (<a href="http://www.africaspeaks.com/reasoning/index.php?topic=10749.0">see the preceding essays</a>), if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money – secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba – would own or control almost all the media worth owning or controlling?

The just-concluded election revealed as much about the corporate media, which has broken every rule of journalism to support Hillary Clinton, and the fraudulence of much of the American Left, which turns out to have no real problem with war or capitalism, than it did about the candidates, themselves. Edward Herman is an exception, a genuine man of the Left. He says “a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war with Syria and Russia.”

“The election of Hillary Clinton might threaten a democratic order as much as a Trump victory.”

Ann Garrison: Earlier this year, you told me that you differ with Noam Chomsky, your co-author of Manufacturing Consent and other books, in that you plan to vote for the Green Party’s presidential and vice presidential candidates Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Are you still planning to do so?

In academic and political lectures, when I refer to the negative psychological and economic impact slavery has had on black people, my questioners usually retort: "You have to bring up slavery again?"

The same people who object to my bringing up slavery's impact upon black people have no objections when Jews urge their people: "Never forget!"

This raises the question: Why should black people forget about slavery when Haiti, well into the 20th century, paid reparations to France for having fought for and won their freedom? In 1825, threatening an invasion, France sent a flotilla to Haiti to compel Haitians to pay a ransom of 150 million gold francs for their freedom. It was reduced subsequently to 90 million gold francs or US$40 billion in today's currency. In 2010, 90 leading academics, authors, and human rights activists, in an open letter to president Nicolas Sarkozy, "urged the French government to pay Haiti for the 90 million gold francs Haitians were forced to pay France for their independence" (London, Guardian, 16 August 2010).

The Russian government deceived itself with its fantasy belief that Russia and Washington had a common cause in fighting ISIS. The Russian government even went along with the pretense that the various ISIS groups operating under various pen names were “moderate rebels” who could be separated from the extremists, all the while agreeing to cease fighting on successive verges of victory so that Washington could resupply ISIS and prepare to introduce US and NATO forces into the conflict. The Russian government apparently also thought that as a result of the coup against Erdogan, which was said to implicate Washington, Turkey was going to cease supporting ISIS and cooperate with Russia.

Alas, the Russians so fervently, or perhaps I should say feverishly, desired an agreement with Washington that they deceived themselves. If Finian Cunningham’s report is correct, Washington has taken advantage of Russia’s urging that Washington and Turkey join in the attack on ISIS by invading northern Syria under the guise of “fighting ISIS.”

If Turkey leaves NATO, that would be a big change. Turkey has been in the pockets of Washington for a long time. If Washington was behind the coup, this probably has damaged the relationship permanently. Erdogan has very strong motives to realign with Russia despite the problems he had caused. The Russian government has a very strong interest to overlook Turkey’s past behavior and to befriend it, because it weakens NATO on Russia’s borders. There is a possibility, but I don’t know how quickly it happens and what Washington will try to do to retrieve the relationship. It will be some sort of a competition to establish relations with Turkey.

I think Washington will try to fix the problems with Turkey. It has an endless supply of money, because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. So they can offer to Turkish leader billions of dollars.

It's been a good spring and summer so far for Teach For America alum Deray McKesson. After raising a ton of out of town money the dude in the blue vest finished sixth in the Baltimore mayoral election with a mere 2% of the vote. He was promptly awarded a six figure yearly salary as “interim chief of human capital,” the current term of art for personnel department directors. And last weekend, he was one of the headliners at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival.

The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Uni0n was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.

This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.

A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain's ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.

“Eritrea’s fierce independence has put it in imperialism’s crosshairs.”

The United States is methodically setting the stage for a so-called “humanitarian” military intervention against the small northeast African nation of Eritrea, under legal pretexts much like those used to justify NATO’s war of regime change against Libya, in 2011. As in Libya, the U.S. has hijacked the United Nations human rights apparatus to claim a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) Eritrea’s citizens from alleged abuses by their own government. War and regime change are the intended result.

Washington engineered UN sanctions against Eritrea, beginning in 2009, on the patently bogus charge that Eritrea’s determinedly secular government provided “political, financial and logistical support” to Islamist Shabaab fighters in Somalia. Islamic jihadism is anathema to Eritrea, whose population of six million on the shores of the Red Sea is about evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. But few people in the United States knew Eritrea existed, much less its secular revolutionary history and politics. The lies stuck, as did the sanctions, even after the UN Human Rights Council conceded there was no further evidence of Eritrean aid to the Shabaab.

A nod to the great Muhammad Ali, dead at 74, a brave black man at a difficult time who "just wanted to be free," who never knew his place and refused to be afraid when others tried to put him in it, who insisted to the world of power that first honored and then rejected him that "I don't have to be what you want me to be," who at the height of his fame and riches declared "Goddamn the White Man's money" in the name of principle, who refused to join a racist unjust war, connected the dots of white oppression around the world and proclaimed, "The real enemy of my people is here."

Though so many remember him for unprecedented grit and grace in the boxing ring, Ali himself chose again and again to measure his own worth in the world beyond his bloody sport. “Boxing is nothing, just satisfying to some bloodthirsty people," he said near the end of his reign. "I’m no longer a Cassius Clay, a Negro from Kentucky. I belong to the world, the black world." The final irony of Ali's political heroism, notes Dave Zirin, is that he was unequivocally hailed as a national icon only after he lost his fearless voice.

In Brazil the country’s largest newspaper has published a transcript of a secret recording leaked to the newspaper. The words recorded are the plot by the rich Brazilian elite, involving both the US-corrupted Brazilian military and Supreme Court, to remove the democratically elected president of Brazil under false charges in order to stop the investigations of the corrupt elites who inhabit Brazil’s senate and bring to an end Brazil’s membership in BRICS. The Russian-Chinese attempt to organize an economic bloc independent of Washington has now lost 20% of its membership.

Democracy has been overthrown in Brazil as in Ukraine, Honduras—indeed, everywhere the dirty evil hand of Washington falls, including the US itself.

Glenn Greenwald reports on the extraordinary leak of the 75-minute recording of the conversations between Brazilian elites laying out the plot to frame the President of Brazil in order to protect themselves.

Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.

The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”, she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims in faraway places.

Having successfully used the EU to conquer the Greek people by turning the Greek “leftwing” government into a pawn of Germany’s banks, Germany now finds the IMF in the way of its plan to loot Greece into oblivion.

The IMF’s rules prevent the organization from lending to countries that cannot repay the loan. The IMF has concluded on the basis of facts and analysis that Greece cannot repay. Therefore, the IMF is unwilling to lend Greece the money with which to repay the private banks.

The IMF says that Greece’s creditors, many of whom are not creditors but simply bought up Greek debt at a cheap price in hopes of profiting, must write off some of the Greek debt in order to lower the debt to an amount that the Greek economy can service.

Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment was motivated by her efforts to circumvent US dollar dominance through trade with Iran, rather than the ongoing allegations of corruption, hypothesizes independent analyst Haneul Na’avi.

In ancient times, communities would place their sins on the body of an al-Azazel, or scapegoat, and cast it into the desert to die. This was done every year in order to garner favoritism in the eyes of God and ensure a bountiful harvest. In the same ritualistic fashion, Brazil’s acting government has chosen to honor this tradition at the expense of the consent of the governed.

Ousted President and Worker’s Party (PT) leader Dilma Rousseff awaits a fabricated impeachment trial despite the chagrin of the Chamber of Deputies Speaker Waldir Maranhao who ordered an annulment. A defiant Congress has hurled its entire weight at the gates of Brasilia’s Superior Courts with burnt offerings of her political career; with the hope her sacrifice will birth a neocolonial Dark Age. Hands clasped, they await the blessings of Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, and the US State Department to affirm their convictions.